A 765,000-volt line is going straight over Main Street in Irvine, Kentucky. Barbara Combs has until September 30 to move 214 baskets out from under it.
She is 72. She has sewn in the same front room since 1988, on the same machine, with nobody helping her. There are 214 baskets left in it.
A utility has surveyed a 765-kilovolt transmission corridor down the length of Main Street in Irvine, Kentucky, to carry power to a data center campus two counties east. The cleared strip is a hundred and fifty feet wide. Barbara Combs’ workshop sits inside it. She has to be out by September 30, and clearing starts October 6. There are 214 finished baskets stacked against the wall, every one of them cut and sewn by her. She has cut the price by 55% rather than watch them go in a dumpster.
One page, certified mail
The letter came on a Thursday in April. One page, a survey map folded behind it, and a phone number that goes to a call center in another state.
A utility had filed for a 765-kilovolt transmission corridor — the high-capacity kind, the kind carried on lattice towers you can see from four miles off. It runs east, toward a data center campus two counties over. A corridor like that needs a cleared strip a hundred and fifty feet wide, and it runs in a straight line, because a straight line is cheaper than a bend.
The centerline crosses Main Street in Irvine at an angle. The old dry-goods building where Barbara Combs works sits forty feet off it. That is inside the strip. It does not matter that the building is twenty-two feet wide, or that it has been standing since 1911, or that the rent on it is a hundred and ten dollars a month.
She has until September 30 to hand the key back. Crews start clearing October 6.
Forty feet off the centerline
There was a hearing in May. Barbara did not go. “Forty people went,” she says. “They were very polite to everybody.”
The thing she keeps coming back to is not the tower and not the money. It is the direction.
“It doesn’t stop here,” she says. “Not one bit of that power is for this county. It comes in over the ridge and it goes out the other side. They’ll take the whole street so something two counties over can run all night.”
She says it flatly, the way you’d read a weather report off the radio. She does not want anybody angry on her account, and she will not be drawn on whether it is fair.
“They were always going to get it. I’m not going to spend my last summer sour about it.”
Why it doesn’t behave like the one from the big store
Pick one up and the first thing you notice is that it stands up by itself. It is not a bag pretending to be a basket. The wall is dense and soft at the same time, because the padding comes from the quilting, not from a foam insert.
The colors do not read as printed either, and that is because they are not printed. Each piece is cut, laid down and stitched in place, so the edges catch the light the way a quilt on a bed catches it.
- Quilted on her own machine — a 1961 Singer that belonged to her mother-in-law. Row by row. That is where the shape and the padding come from.
- One room, one person. Cut, laid, stitched and finished by Barbara. No assembly line, no second pair of hands, not in thirty-eight years.
- Layered, not printed. Every piece of the picture is cut and stitched down separately, which is why the edges catch the light and why the color is still the color seventeen years later.
- Cotton over polyester batting. Holds its structure, stays soft. It does not slump when it is half full.
- Padded fabric handles on both sides, wide enough that they don’t bite into your fingers with a full load in it.
- 22″ tall, 16″ across. A full wash, or blankets, or toys, or yarn. Folds flat when you don’t need it out.
- Nothing on it is perfectly centered. A petal sits a little high, a leaf a little wide. That is what a hand does and a printer doesn’t.
- Seven motifs left: harvest pumpkins & sunflowers, sunflower field, elephant, bears & pines, wildflowers & butterflies, sea turtle & palms, guitar & waves.
Sewing between the boxes
She did not set out to do any of this.
In February 1988 her husband came off a loading platform at the quarry and did not go back to work. That is the short of it. What it meant was that by March there was a stack of envelopes on the kitchen counter that Barbara had stopped opening.
She had sewn most of her life and never once charged for it. Church sales. The county fair. A liner for whoever’s hamper had split. Her mother-in-law, Ruth Combs, had taught her in the winter of 1974 on a 1961 Singer — cast iron, heavier than it looks — and when Ruth died the machine came to the house.
That April she put four of them in the trunk of the car and drove to the Saturday market in Irvine. The next week Stanton. Then Beattyville, then as far as Richmond when the weather held and the gas money was there.
She priced the first one at ninety dollars.
“I about couldn’t say it out loud,” she says. “Ninety dollars. Here. In 1988. I had every intention of carrying that basket home again and putting it back in the closet.”
It sold before eleven in the morning. So did the second one, and a woman from Winchester ordered two more off the table. That is the week Barbara started writing numbers in the bottoms — in pencil, half out of stubbornness, half to find out whether she would ever get as far as ten.
By that summer she had the front room of the old dry-goods store on Main Street, two doors down from the courthouse corner. One room, plank floor, a window facing east. Sixty dollars a month.
Thirty-eight years on, the Saturday markets are mostly gone and the stores that carried her have closed. She is at four thousand one hundred.
The part she can’t take with her
Barbara is not losing a career. She is seventy-two and she says herself she was slowing down anyway.
What she is losing is the room. The east window over the cutting table. The radiator that starts ticking a little before six, when the coffee is on and the cloth is cut and nobody has asked her for anything yet. The groove she has worn into the plank floor on one side of the machine.
The obvious question is why she doesn’t move two doors down. The answer is the shape of the thing that is coming. A corridor is not a building site — it is a strip, and the strip takes four buildings on her side of Main Street, two of which have stood empty since the pharmacy went. The rooms she might have moved into are inside the line as well.
So in October she is going to Richmond, to be ten minutes from Renee instead of forty. The apartment that came up there is on the second floor. One bedroom. The front room measures eleven feet across.
The Singer would fit. The cutting table would not.
“I measured it twice,” she says. “Then I got Renee to measure it, because I thought I’d done it wrong. I’d be cutting on the bed. I’m not going to do that at seventy-two.”
When she hands the key back at the end of September, that is where it stops.
Seventeen years in a laundry room
What she is proudest of has nothing to do with how one looks the week it arrives.
“A lady in Missouri wrote me in March,” she says. “She’s had hers since 2009. Seventeen years in a laundry room, and a laundry room is the worst place in a house — it’s damp, it’s hot, everything in it gets dropped on. She sent me a photograph. The colors were the colors. All she wanted was for me to put a new handle on it.”
She did. It went back out that Friday.
“I’ve bought plenty of things that looked better in the picture than they did in the hall. This one didn’t. It’s heavier than I thought it would be and it stands up empty. You can feel the stitching through the side of it.”
“I bought the sunflowers because my mother grew them along the fence line. It sits at the end of the hall with throws in it and I like the room better with it there. My son’s wife asked me twice where it came from before I told her.”
“Bought the bears one for the cabin and quietly kept it at the house instead. Sick about what’s happening to that street.”
The last 214
Right now there are 214 finished baskets stacked along the west wall. Whatever has not gone out by the end of September does not come with her. There is nowhere for it to go.
Which is why the price is what it is. Barbara has taken the whole remainder down by 55% — not as a promotion, but because the date on the letter is real and she has decided how she wants this to finish.
“I’m not going to spend my last weeks in here haggling over eighty dollars. I’d rather picture every one of them in somebody’s house than in a dumpster on the sixth of October.”
One place only
Barbara’s baskets are sold in one place: Marlow Market Co., the small online shop her daughter Renee (48) runs for her.
“Mom won’t go near the computer,” Renee says. “She sews, I ship. This month I’m mostly taping boxes.”
Renee set the shop up in 2019, after the craft fair circuit in Berea thinned out and the store in Winchester that had carried her mother’s work for two decades closed. Before that, everything went out of the room itself — women came, looked, and carried one to the car. “She still likes that better,” Renee says. “She’d rather hand it to you.”
“It’s gone quicker than we set up for. Monday morning we were at 214. I’m not going to guess where we are by Sunday — once they’re gone there’s no room left to make more in.”
— Renee, Marlow Market Co.Questions we got asked most
Look at the picture on the front from the side. On Barbara’s, every piece is a separate bit of cloth laid down and stitched, so the edges stand slightly proud and catch the light. Lookalikes have turned up on the big marketplaces, and in a listing photo they can pass — but they are printed, so the front is flat and every one of them is identical.
Yes, while it is still on the shelf. Seven are left, and some of them are down to single figures.
Then that is the end of it. There are 214 and there is no restock — not because of a sales rule, but because after the first week of October there is no room to sew in.
Renee ships within two business days. Delivery inside the continental U.S. is typically 5–9 days. She is one person with a tape gun, so the busy weeks run at the slower end.
Yes — 90 days, no questions. That has been the arrangement since long before any of this.
Last word
This is a plain object that does an ordinary job in a room nobody photographs. That is most of the point of it.
It holds a wash. It stands up on its own. It has sunflowers or a bear or a sea turtle on the front because somebody once wanted one that way, and every stitch in it was put there by one woman in one room over thirty-eight years.
Until the end of September, buying one is a way of making sure that work leaves the room through the front door instead of the back.
Every basket goes out with a 90-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.
“These ought to go to women who’ll actually use them,” she says. “If it isn’t right, send it back. I’d just like it to be some use to somebody.”
“I drove down in July because I wanted to see it before it went. One room, one machine, radio going, one woman working. I came back with two.”
“Four years old, gets emptied every other day, still stands up straight. If you’ve been thinking about it I wouldn’t think much longer.”
“Ordered the wildflowers for my daughter and ended up keeping it. She has since ordered her own. Now there’s a date on the whole thing.”